Meet UC’s big-data problem solvers

A major objective of Research 2030, UC’s 10-year plan for research, is advancing research with impact at scale.

“The UC Office of Research is helping faculty, students and staff across UC scale up their research to maximize its impact,” UC Vice President for Research Patrick Limbach said.

“Through our over $3 million in investments in tech-savvy staff, upgrades to UC’s Data Center and cutting-edge equipment, the Advanced Research Computing Center is propelling research at UC.”

The center also provides data storage, which is no small consideration at a Research 1 university. The center also provides training on requested technology such as its high-performance computing apprenticeship program. The center offers three workshops every term on topics such as Introduction to Linux and optimization techniques for high-performance computing.

In 2023, the computing center's staff established a new service center to provide UC faculty, students and even external customers with expert facilitation and instructional, consultative and storage services at a fraction of the rate of other services.

Why use the Advanced Research Computing Center? Because time is a critical factor in research due to resource constraints, the dynamic nature of knowledge, competition, technological advancements, urgency in addressing certain issues, career-related considerations and more. Expediency is essential.

“The ARCC's equipment and staff help researchers access and use all the computational tools available which saves a ton of time, opens up new research avenues, and equips them with extremely valuable and highly sought-after skills in the marketplace,” said Prashant Khare, a professor in UC's College of Engineering and Applied Science and academic director of the center.

In 2018, Khare was the recipient of a National Science Foundation award through its major research instrumentation program which allowed UC to establish the center.

“These days everyone is doing power computing in academia, industry and the government. Through its apprenticeship program and services, the Advanced Research Computing Center is helping to develop the next generation of leaders in important fields,” Khare said.

More recently, Combs, the center's administrative director, teamed up with other universities in the region on an NSF proposal and was awarded more than $1 million to expand the regional expertise in artificial intelligence, machine learning and cloud computing.

This equipment and funding supports equipment, staff and the computing center's apprenticeship and instructional programs, which offers three workshops every term on topics such as Introduction to Linux and optimization techniques for high-performance computing. The center also partnered with sponsors NVIDIA, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and Procter & Gamble Co. to organize and host its first rapid research challenge/hackathon in winter 2024 exploring topics important to them such as large language models, generative AI and more.

The computing center fills a skills gap for departments across campus, Khare said. Even in his own research in propulsion systems, he has found the Advanced Research Computing Center to be indispensable and acknowledges it in his published research papers.

“The ARCC is a great way for researchers to have not only their data and computations in one place but also different versions of the software they’re running,” Combs said.

But perhaps the biggest asset of the Advanced Research Computing Center is its people, Khare said.

“We scientists are problem-solvers and we’re notorious for trying to figure everything out for ourselves. However, the strengths of the ARCC is that UC's Digital Technology Solutions secures your data and won’t sell your data, it’s far less expensive than other options, the staff are here at UC to help us and importantly they work with an array of big-data problems every single day and they can help us figure things out in 30 seconds where it would have otherwise taken a researcher five hours. And that’s a big benefit that we don’t talk enough about,” Khare said.

Featured image at top: Members of UC's Advanced Research Computing Center are available to help students and faculty across campus with their projects. Photo/Andrew Higley/UC Marketing + Brand